KFC’s plan to catch up in the fried chicken wars: Ditch the bones

Fried chicken is making American restaurants more money than ever, except at KFC — the very place that pioneered selling it by the bucket load across the country.

Chick-fil-A fans swarm to its sandwiches and milkshakes, Popeyes’s launches go viral on social media, Raising Cane’s is drawing diners with its yellow Labrador mascot and 2.3 million TikTok followers, and McDonald’s now sells about as much chicken as it does beef.

But KFC? “Invisible” and “irrelevant,” according to one of its leaders. It was the only major chicken chain where sales fell last year.

“We used to be an American icon,” KFC US President Catherine Tan-Gillespie said in an interview. “Somewhere along the way we stopped acting like one.”

The problem for KFC, owned by Yum! Brands Inc., is in its bones. The 73-year-old